


To stay till the world’s end

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: American Civil War, Conversations, F/M, Female Friendship, Marriage, Nurses, Post-Canon, Romantic Gestures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-02
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-11-22 10:09:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11378019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: Friendship is an endless discovery.





	To stay till the world’s end

“The most romantic gesture?” Mary repeated. Emma sat across from her in the sunny front parlor that overlooked Prince Street, a tea service laid out on the table between them. Mary could make out the sound of Julia in the kitchen, her instructions to Keturah interspersed with snatches of hymns, Miriam’s occasional bright babble. Emma, despite her plain dress and worn slippers, looked as pretty as Mary had ever seen her and because she was not a saint, Mary could not help ruing a little how pale and thin she herself remained from her illness. She could easily imagine Jedediah remonstrating with her or bestowing some elaborate, expansive compliment if she ever let him know this small vanity, so she kept silent, reminding herself she had never been a great beauty and so the change would not give anyone much pause.

“There have been so many, you cannot pick?” Emma prompted, her tone teasing and light-hearted. She had confided soon after they sat down to their tea that she and the chaplain had reached a certain understanding, a phrasing Mary knew meant she might expect the announcement of an engagement in the near future. It would not be as it had been before the War began, when there would have be teas and balls for Henry to be introduced at, uncomfortable in the most polite, formal attire that society favored, his family connections mentioned gently and skillfully so that the ladies of Alexandria would know how well Emma was to be married. Mary knew that Emma’s communication with her family was still very limited and marriage to a Yankee chaplain, a man of good family but little wealth, would not further the reconciliation. However, the change in her friend’s aspect was remarkable; with the articulated reciprocation of her deepest feelings and the promise of a true and fulfilling marriage, Emma was sunny, her quick wit more apparent, at ease with herself in a way Mary had not seen in her before. She was more apt to ask Mary’s advice about matters in the hospital and more inventive in her own elaborations to Mary’s solutions. She would even play the coquette with Jedediah if he joined them for the last cup in the pot, tossing her head and gaily chiding him so that he laughed heartily, even dabbed at his eyes with the handkerchief Mary had embroidered for him.

Now, Emma wanted to talk about love and courtship, her own and Mary’s, to share her happiness and she did not imagine what the question would mean to Mary. She was so young, Emma Green, even though she was a woman grown, and she had forgotten, perhaps, that this was not Mary’s first marriage. Mary thought, looking at Emma’s bright eyes, the dimple in her cheek, that Emma had asked the question anticipating some tale of fierce Dr. Foster on his knees reciting Shakespeare or Keats, proffering a bouquet carefully arranged to communicate his feelings, white camellias telling Mary she was adorable, lily-of-the-valley that she had made his life complete, primroses to say he could not live without her. Emma must imagine moonlight or starlight, a billet-doux signed _Yours ever and only Jedediah_ , that the string of pearls Mary sometimes wore had been presented in a velvet-lined case, left by a great-grandmother for the next Foster bride. 

It was none of those. Jedediah would press a kiss to the center of her palm before he left the house, swiftly and simply, telling her to be well and rest. He ordered her not poetry, but mathematical texts from Bonn and Edinburgh, and brought her a length of daisy-strewn calico to make up into a dress for Keturah instead of nosegays. He was not romantic, he only loved her, and she didn’t feel the lack. She thought of Emma’s question and remembered being a young girl, a bluestocking bride. She remembered coming home and clapping her hands in glee and knew she had the right answer.

“I’m afraid you shall be disappointed, but you have asked and I can only tell the truth,” Mary began, enjoying the memory before she spoke of it aloud.

“Please, go on,” Emma said.

“My first husband, the Baron, he knew how much I was taken with the natural world, how I never rambled in the fields without bringing home a piece of quartz or a curiously shaped stalk, how I liked to search the sea-shore for fluted shells. I had to go away for a while, to help my sister in her second confinement, and when I came home, I found he had made me an aquarium,” Mary explained. She could see it in her mind’s eye, the glass tank filled with clear water, crabs scuttling upon the sandy bottom, some weed waving and all sorts of fish weaving through, silvery and gleaming. She had cried out with delight and felt Gustav behind her, his hands on her waist, his beard tickling her throat as he murmured _Sie sind glücklich, dann meine Perle, meine Marieke_ and how it had felt to trace a finger across the pane, wonder and the pleasure of being known.

“An aquarium?” Emma asked. 

“It was something I had always wanted and never thought to have. It was the work of his own two hands and time spent away from his own experiments. But I understand it will not sound so very enchanting to someone else,” Mary said.

“What happened to it?” Emma asked, surprising her a little. 

“I gave it to my nephews, for their own collections. I lived with them for some time, after I was widowed, and while I could not bear to look at it when it had been in my own home, with their interest, I could find a consolation in it that had eluded me,” Mary said. How solemn they had been at first, especially Mattie, until she pointed out the dorsal fin on the closest fish, the delicate pattern of shimmering scales and how she had recorded it in her own journal and then, how they had begun to point out their own observations, make elaborate plans of what creatures they might capture and study. She thought of them in Boston, two budding naturalists, in that way the children she and Gustav had never conceived. There was no blood relation, but she saw Gustav’s eye in Mattie, his endless questioning in Joe’s tone, the gentle way he held a specimen. They had called her Tante Perle, not knowing they used an endearment for her name, and she had not corrected them, even when it hurt her the most.

“I think I begin to see,” Emma said softly, all her winsome gaiety gone and in its place, a subtle and mature affection. This was the woman who would be Mrs. Hopkins, though Mary hoped Henry would make sure that girlish levity remained.

“And now, will you tell me yours?” Mary asked.

“No, let’s not speak of romance any longer but of friendship, of the future and what it may hold,” Emma replied, looking at Mary but taking in the sitting room, the basket of mending, the sunlight on the jug of late roses. She nodded to herself, ever so slightly, the nurse’s certainty she had found the right remedy at last. “Tell me about your garden, won’t you? A garden is such a hopeful place.”

**Author's Note:**

> I saw a post on Tumblr which included a letter written by the actual Gustav von Olnhausen in which he talks about building Mary an aquarium of her own-- how irresistible for fan fiction! The title is taken from his letter. Mattie and Joe appear courtesy of emmadelosnardos's story-- now I believe fanon staples, at least as far as I'm concerned. The language of flowers is readily searchable. Gustav says (through Google's English to German translator) "Are you happy, my pearl, my Marieke?"


End file.
